Stewart Butterfield's Tiny Speck Gets $5M From VCs

Tiny Speck, an online game company based in San Francisco and Vancouver has raised $5 million in Series A funding from Accel Partners and Andreessen Horowitz. Accel led this recent round of financing. Accel’s Andrew Braccia will join the board of the company started by Stewart Butterfield, co-founder of popular and ground breaking photo sharing site, Flickr. Tiny Speck is one of the more high-profile start-ups, thanks to presence of former Flickr staffers such as Cal Henderson, Serguei Mourachov and Eric Costello and former Digg designer, Daniel Burka.

The company had previously raised $1.5 million from Accel Partners, and a half a dozen angels including Marc Andreessen; Jeff Weiner, the CEO of LinkedIn; Rob Solomon from Technology Crossover Ventures and the former CEO of Sidestep; as well as Brad Horowitz, who is VP of products at Google.

Tiny Speck’s first offering is Glitch, a browser-based massively multiplayer game. When I spoke to Stewart earlier today he said that the company will use the money to expand its operations both in Vancouver and in San Francisco, where he hopes to establish an engineering beachhead. Stewart visualized Canada as the center for company’s creative productions. Tiny Speck, which currently employs eight (along with a dozen contractors) already has quite a few open positions. Stewart said those numbers are going to swell. He hopes to launch the beta version of Glitch in December 2010.

In an interview, Stewart told our own Mathew Ingram that the company would develop ” companion applications for mobile — so iPhone and Android — that give you a more limited amount of gameplay but allow you to kind of interact with the game without having the whole client open.”